


Son of the Spider

by Accidentallytechohazardous



Category: Bleach
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, Strangulation, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-20
Updated: 2016-07-20
Packaged: 2018-07-25 16:06:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7539112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Accidentallytechohazardous/pseuds/Accidentallytechohazardous
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If the lieutenant thing didn't work out, he could always take up moonlighting as a Second Division interrogator. </p>
<p>Shuuhei, after the War.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Son of the Spider

The plain walls of the cell are as white as anything, blinding as shiny, new teeth. Each one is a jaw clamped around its prisoner, a skull to be locked inside of and rot away like a cavity or an unwanted thought. 

 

Normally, the person doing business in a place like this would be a member of the Second Division. Extremely odd cases would find themselves in the care of the Twelfth Division. Neither are here today. Shuuhei doesn’t mind. He knows they’re understaffed right now, and he has found himself some free time. Latex snaps against his wrist, gloves tight against his knuckles and the creases in his fingers like a second skin. 

 

He doesn’t recognize the person in the cell- or maybe he does. In time, Shuuhei’s memories of the war will become clearer and clearer. He plans to document each one, create a tome that not even the Central 46 or the academics will sully with their false ‘experiences’ of a week that nearly ripped reality apart at the stitches. For now, trying to force the memories give Shuuhei a headache that not even hours staring at numbers and budgets and battle schematics can chase out. He’ll stare at the surface of his desk for nights in a row just to numb his brain. If one wants to feel nothing, than nothing is what he must become.

 

The person- the prisoner stirs in their chair, as much as one can stir in their condition. The reiatsu suppressors all prisoners in the Maggots’ Nest wear could keep one in a practical waking coma, or on the edge of death. Complacent and slow and stupid. It’s a black ring around their throat above the uniform of pure white that echoes of their Wanderiech garb. The sight draws Shuuhei’s eye. He can’t remember if this poor soul was a Sternritter or a Soldat or whatever. He hopes it’s a Sternitter. One can be optimistic. 

 

It takes a moment of him standing, a long stretch of shadow, for the quincy’s eyes to focus. They blink, at once hazy and wide, then narrow and clear as reality resurfaces. Whatever the Second Division is pumping them full of, it can’t be pretty on the nervous system. They’ll have to flush it out before the trial. There will be a trial, right? That’s what they do for war criminals. That sounds about right.

 

“The fuck do you want?” They spit at Shuuhei, lips twisted in a gruesome scowl and eyes full of beady, black hate. Like they’re the one who should be disgusted by Shuuhei, and not obviously the other way around. Something in his stomach crawls with loathing.

 

Loathing is the perfect word for it. Anger is too red, too hot. Loathing is like a dark, thick, sticky tar. It bubbles. It boils. It consumes. 

 

Shuuhei walks forward and tries to unlock the ancient knowledge he learned slicing bodies open with Kazeshini and picking apart dead rats as a child. The dead rats were when he was a child. Kazeshini was- you get the idea. The quincy-hopefully-Sternritter jerks their head back until it slams against the back of their chair.

 

“Told your fucking wardens and shit everything I know. You ought to run back to your boss and tell them it’s all over. You won, alright? We lost!” 

 

With the press of a button, the prisoner’s cuffs shackling them to the chair are undone. The quincy looks at their own hand on confusion, then at Shuuhei. For one, brief, fragile second, a glimmer of something runs through their eyes. Something like disbelief. Hope.

 

Shuuhei is a pacifist, by nature. He hates fighting, and unnecessary violence. Of course, he has his temper to keep in check, and a streak of arrogance that has led him astray more than once. But nine out of ten times, he’d rather have a calm, civil debate than let things devolve into fists. 

 

Tousen taught him those things, for better or worse. Shuuhei thinks that whatever else about Tousen, it was for better. Tousen taught him the consequences of power. Tousen taught him that sometimes in order to stop innocent people from being hurt, one must allow oneself to hurt and be hurt. 

 

Tousen’s lesson did not include what was appropriate after the fact. It’s actually pretty funny that the only thing Tousen didn’t prepare Shuuhei for was how to deal with losing someone. 

 

Hands are wrapped around the prisoner’s throat. Without thinking or ordering his body to move, Shuuhei’s arms are raising. He has more strength in his own person than he can imagine, the same person he feels so divorced from. This body, Shuuhei’s body, is the furthest thing and also the only real thing. Everything else thread and spiderwebs. Too delicate. Too vulnerable to real, human hands. 

 

For a moment he just watches. Watches and listens. The quincy’s face hovers above his own, turns a garish shade of red, cheeks blown up and lips parted in a desperate bid for oxygen, but all it does is force air out of their lungs faster. Shuuhei’s hands, cloaked in a professional layer of latex, gripping a throat with his fingers wrapped around the soft sides and his thumbs crossed over in an ‘X’ above the windpipe. 

 

He tries to find an emotion that suits this moment, whether it’s triumph or abject horror or rage, but Shuuhei couldn’t find a feeling inside himself if he ripped his own throat open and reached around inside his chest. 

 

“You killed people.” Shuuhei states. He uses the voice with the same weight and sternness he does when he is tutoring his subordinates or guest speaking at a class lecture for young students. “You killed them, and your associates killed even more. Many good people are dead now.”

 

He does not need to add any more detail. He does not need sentimentality to add the punch to his words. He does not need the imagine of Kensei’s face, slack and expressionless. His spine sitting up stiffly with his shoulders wide apart, as if he were preparing to give a speech or chide Shuuhei for obsessing too much, only to have the imagine ruined by his head bent towards his chest and a touch of drool collecting at the corner of his lips. Shuuhei asks Isane for the hundredth time when the treatment is supposed to start working, while trying to convince himself it looks like Kensei is sleeping.

 

He does not need Rangiku with her skin as cold as ice. The electric blue of her eyes gone glassy and sunken in. Her hair and her skin clinging to her skeleton. She stands on her feet but she wobbles, uncertainly, like a puppet. It’s only a matter of time until they figure out how to undo this, the Fourth Division says, while Rangiku shivers violently like she is about to collapse into skin and blood and meats. A pulse of something that resembles a worm appears under her skin and runs down from her temple to the opposite side of her jaw, and they call that progress. 

 

He doesn’t need Izuru. Izuru, who Shuuhei could only wish was comatose. Izuru, whose eyes move of their own accord and his voice is scratchy but still his. But his words are not. He sits in bed, one lanky form that has been cleaved almost in half and the end result looks bizarrely unfinished. He looks like the construction project of a child that was left undone, cobbled together too quickly towards the end. He lets Shuuhei sit in his hospital room and bring him books and all that pours from his mouth is fucking filth. All he speaks about his hatred for himself and for this world. His pain is new and raw and bleeding and Shuuhei is tempted to finish the construction project himself, sew Izuru’s lips shut until he is ready to not be a pain in the ass. Maybe that will be enough of the ‘punishment’ he desires to finally make him happy. 

 

He doesn’t need Renji. He doesn’t even need to think of that. Not now, not ever.

 

“Many good people are dead.” Shuuhei repeats, and this time he can’t stop his lips from curling. Kazeshini giggles in the corner of his brain, amused like watching a kitten kill an insect. A spider creeping along it’s web to the prey bound in white. “I see no reason not to even the scales with a bad person.”

 

The quincy’s eyes- are they watering? Crying? Gross. The quincy’s eyes find his face. “You want me to-” They wheeze, like wind blowing through stone. Shuuhei does not relent. “To tell you information for- for my life? I already told you everything I know!”

 

“No.” Shuuhei’s thumbs press down on the windpipe, and flesh has never felt so soft and breakable under his hands. Behind his lips, Shuuhei’s teeth grit. “I want you to beg me.”

  
  



End file.
